Recettes

Igbo Yam Porridge

Yam is not simply a staple crop among the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria. It is the crop, tied to land, status and the agricultural calendar in a way no other food is, and the yam that goes into this porridge carries that weight into an ordinary weekday meal. Yam porridge is the most direct way to eat it. Slices are cooked until they begin to break down and thicken their own liquid, so the dish is both the yam and the sauce it makes. What marks the version out as Igbo rather than as one of the several other Nigerian yam pottages is the seasoning: ogiri, the fermented seasoning made from oil bean or melon seed, and uziza leaves, whose peppery aroma goes in at the very end. Palm oil supplies the colour and the richness, crayfish the savoury base. Ogiri is the ingredient that decides the dish. Its fermented depth is what separates an Igbo yam porridge from a Yoruba or Hausa preparation of the same root, and households that leave it out are making something else. The porridge is eaten at breakfast and as a light lunch, and it belongs to ordinary domestic cooking rather than to any occasion.

Nigeria30 minDebby

Hausa Masa

Masa, also called waina, is a fermented rice cake from the Hausa of Northern Nigeria: small, round, spongy underneath and browned on the surface, cooked in a dedicated pan with shallow round wells. It belongs to the Hausa, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, and it is among the dishes most closely identified with them. The fermentation is what makes it. Rice is soaked, ground with cooked rice, and left to rise overnight, and the mild sourness that develops is what separates masa from any other rice pancake. The holes that open across the surface as it cooks are the visible evidence of that ferment, and a masa without them has not been left long enough. It is breakfast food and snack food, sold from street stands and in markets across the north, and it appears at celebrations and family gatherings. What goes with it varies by household and by time of day: honey, groundnut oil, a peppery stew, or yaji, the same spice blend used on suya. Masa is a dish that has held its association with one people while spreading well beyond them, which is a fair description of how Hausa food generally has travelled through Nigeria.

Nigeria1 hrLaila

Agidi, also called eko, a Nigerian set corn starch block wrapped in leaves and served with akara

Agidi or Eko

Agidi, called eko in Yoruba, is corn starch cooked to a firm set and left to cool into a smooth, sliceable block. It is faintly sour, cool to eat, and holds its shape on a plate, which makes it unusual among Nigerian starches, most of which are served hot and soft. It is one of the few Nigerian dishes that genuinely crosses every line in the country. North to south, across tribes, classes and religions, agidi turns up on the same table, which is a rarer thing in Nigerian food than the country's shared reputation for hospitality might suggest. It is eaten at breakfast with akara, the fried bean cake, and it is served alongside pepper soup, stew, banga, ogbono and egusi at other hours. It comes from the same process that produces ogi, the fermented corn pap, taken further. Where ogi is drunk, agidi is set. It is traditionally poured into uma or banana leaves, which give it its characteristic tapered shape and a faint green scent, and the leaves are the reason it appears in markets as a wrapped parcel rather than a slab. It is also commonly the first solid food given to Nigerian babies.

NigeriaBlessing

Puff-Puff

Puff puff is deep fried yeast dough, golden outside and chewy within, and it is the most widely eaten street snack in West Africa. Flour, sugar, yeast, water and salt are all it requires, which is a large part of why it is everywhere: the ingredients are in every kitchen and the technique needs no equipment. The names change with the border. Puff puff in Nigeria and Cameroon, bofrot or togbei in Ghana, and further variations across the region, but the dough and the method travel intact. It is sold from roadside stands in the evening, made at home for parties and children, and eaten hot from the oil with the fingers. What distinguishes it from a doughnut is the chew. Puff puff dough is a loose batter rather than a kneaded dough, scooped by hand and squeezed into the oil rather than shaped, and the long rise gives it a slightly fermented depth that a quick doughnut does not have. Variations run through the same base: habanero chopped into the batter for a peppered version, milk for a softer and sweeter one, nutmeg or cinnamon for warmth. It is late night food as much as party food, which is how most people who grew up with it remember it.

Nigeria2 hr 20 minBeatrice

Fluffy Pancakes

The thick, risen pancake is a North American and British form rather than an African one, and the source for this recipe says so directly: it describes itself as a basic UK recipe. It is included here as a plain reference version, not as a dish with a claim on the continent. That distinction matters because Africa has its own pancakes and they are not this. The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and deliberately savoury, carrying onion and ground pepper in the batter alongside the sugar. Hausa masa is a fermented rice cake, spongy and slightly sour, cooked in a pan of round wells. Ethiopian injera is a fermented teff flatbread that functions as a plate. Each of those is a distinct thing with its own technique and its own place at a table. What this recipe offers is the baking powder raised, egg and milk enriched, butter cooked pancake that most of the world now recognises from breakfast menus. It is genuinely good and genuinely simple, and there is no reason not to make it. There is also no reason to describe it as African cooking, and the honest position is to present it as what it is.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

Ogi, a Nigerian fermented corn porridge served with akara bean cakes

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Ogi is fermented cereal porridge, sour, smooth and pale, and it is among the first things most Nigerians ever eat. It is called akamu in Igbo and pap in English, and it is made from maize, sorghum or millet steeped in water for up to three days, wet milled, sieved to remove the husks, and then fermented for several more days until it turns distinctly sour. That sourness is the point and it is what separates ogi from any other cereal porridge. It also does real work: fermentation makes the grain more digestible and gives ogi a probiotic character, which is a large part of why it has been the standard weaning food for Nigerian infants for generations and why it is given to people who are unwell or recovering. The same base goes in two directions. Thinned and cooked, it is the porridge eaten at breakfast with akara, moin moin, fried plantain or bread. Cooked much thicker and left to set, it becomes agidi or eko, sliced and eaten with pepper soup or stew. Across the region the names change without the thing changing much: koko in Ghana, uji in Kenya, where it is more often made from millet and sorghum. Three grains are used in Nigeria, and white corn, yellow corn and guinea corn each give a slightly different result.

Nigeria10 minDebby

Fura Da Nono

Fura da nono is millet and milk, and the name says exactly that: fura is the millet ball, nono is the fermented milk. Spiced millet dough is rolled into balls, then mashed into soured milk and drunk from a bowl or a calabash. It is both a meal and a drink and Nigerians do not find that ambiguous. It belongs to the Sahel and to the peoples who move across it. The Fulani, the Hausa and the Zarma-Songhai all make it, and it is eaten across northern Nigeria, Niger and Ghana. Its logic is the logic of cattle keeping: milk that will not keep in the heat is soured deliberately, and millet that grows where little else does is what goes with it. The way it is sold explains its form. Vendors carry the fura balls and the nono separately and combine them to order, mashing the millet into the milk in front of the customer, which lets them sell two products from one stand and keeps the fura from going soggy before it is bought. In a hot climate, a cold, sour, filling drink that costs very little is a serious thing rather than a refreshment, and fura da nono has held its place in northern Nigerian life without needing to modernise.

Nigeria30 minDebby

Nigerian Amasi Spaghetti

This recipe puts amasi, the South African fermented milk, into a Nigerian style spaghetti sauce, and it is worth being clear that it is an invention rather than a dish with a history. Amasi belongs to the Nguni cattle keeping communities of southern Africa, where it is soured in a calabash and eaten over pap. Spaghetti belongs to urban Nigerian home cooking, where it has become one of the most eaten starches in the country. Putting them together is a pan African fusion of a kind that happens more and more as African food writing circulates across the continent, and there is nothing wrong with it. What there is not is any tradition behind it. No Nigerian household inherited this, and no South African one did either. What it does do is show what fermented milk brings to a tomato sauce, which is a real thing worth knowing. Amasi is thick, sharply sour and stable enough to go into a hot pan without curdling in the way fresh milk would, and it turns a tomato and mince sauce creamy and tangy at once. Buttermilk or plain yoghurt does the same job. The dish is presented here as what it is: a modern combination using an African ingredient in an unfamiliar way.

Nigeria1 hrLaila

Eko or agidi, sliced Nigerian fermented corn pudding, served with efo riro vegetable stew

Eko (Agidi) and Efo Riro

Eko and efo riro is a Yoruba pairing, and each half is a substantial dish in its own right. Eko, also called agidi, is a firm pudding set from fermented corn starch, sliced and eaten cold or at room temperature. Efo riro is the Yoruba vegetable stew, built on palm oil, blended pepper, locust beans and leafy greens with assorted meat and smoked fish through it. The contrast is the point. Eko is cool, firm and slightly sour from the fermentation, with a clean corn flavour and almost nothing else going on. Efo riro is hot, oily, salty and densely flavoured. Putting them together works in the way that plain rice and a heavy curry work, and neither is quite right without the other. Eko is traditionally set in wrapped leaves, which give it its characteristic shape and a faint aroma the greased mould does not reproduce. It is sold that way across southwestern Nigeria, most often alongside akara or moin moin at breakfast, though the pairing with efo riro makes it an evening meal. Riro means stirred, and the name describes the technique: the vegetables are stirred into the finished stew base rather than cooked in it, so they hold their texture.

Nigeria1 hrTaiwo Oladapo

Oha Soup

Oha soup is an Igbo soup from southeastern Nigeria, built on the leaves of Pterocarpus mildbraedii, an African evergreen tree. The leaves are seasonal, which makes the soup an occasion rather than an everyday dish, and there is no substitute that reproduces its flavour. The leaves are shredded by hand, never cut with a knife. The reason given is that a blade turns the soup bitter, and whether or not that holds chemically, the practice is observed universally and is one of the more widely known food rules in Igbo cooking. It is worth following on its own terms. Thickening is where families diverge. Cocoyam, pounded smooth after boiling, is the standard, though achi and ofor are both used and give slightly different bodies. The oil divides along geography: Anambra households use akwu, raw palm kernel oil, while Imo households use ordinary palm oil, and each considers its own version correct. Uziza leaves go in alongside the oha for a peppery counterpoint, and ogiri igbo, the fermented seasoning paste, supplies the deep savoury note the soup is built around.

Nigeria1 hr 25 minNympha

Ayamase Stew

Ayamase is the green pepper stew of southwestern Nigeria, known almost as widely by two other names, ofada sauce, after the rice it is served with, and designer stew, which is what Lagos took to calling it. It is defined by two things that would be faults in almost any other stew. The peppers are green rather than red, which gives the sauce its unusual dark olive colour. And the palm oil is deliberately bleached, heated until it stops smoking and loses its red pigment, which strips out the characteristic palm flavour and leaves something nuttier and smokier behind. That bleaching step is the whole signature of the dish, and a version made with unbleached oil is a different sauce. Around that sit iru, the fermented locust bean that carries the deep savoury note, assorted meats including offal, and boiled eggs, which are close to obligatory. The name points to a person. Ayamase is traced to Ikenne-Remo in Ogun State and to a woman remembered as Mrs Felicia, Iya Mase, the wife of Mase, who is credited with the dish. It travelled from there into Lagos party food, where its reputation as something special was made. It is served with ofada rice, the short, unpolished local rice whose earthy flavour is the intended partner.

Nigeria55 mindonbuffy

Nigerian Eba cassava flour swallow in a bowl, the most widely eaten Nigerian starchy staple made from garri

Eba

Eba is garri turned into a swallow, cassava that has already been peeled, grated, fermented, pressed and dry-fried into granules, then reconstituted with boiling water into a smooth, firm dough eaten with soup. It is probably the most-eaten swallow in Nigeria, and its dominance has an entirely practical explanation. Garri keeps for months without refrigeration, needs no cooking to store, is cheap, and turns into a meal in about three minutes with nothing but hot water. In a country where power and cold storage are not guaranteed, that combination is difficult to beat. Pounded yam may carry more prestige, but garri carries the country. Two kinds are in general use. Yellow garri has palm oil worked in during frying, which gives it colour and a richer taste. White garri is fried without it and is plainer and more neutral. Which one a household keeps is largely regional and partly personal. Eba is not eaten on its own. It is a vehicle, pinched off with the fingers, rolled lightly, dipped into soup and swallowed rather than chewed, which is where the English name for the category comes from. Egusi, okra, afang, ogbono and every other Nigerian soup are all served with it. The fermentation that produces garri also removes the cyanogenic compounds present in raw cassava, which is why the processing matters as much as it does.

NigeriaBlessing

African salad, the Igbo dish of shredded cassava abacha with fermented ugba and palm oil

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

African salad is the Igbo dish of abacha and ugba, and it is a salad only in the loosest sense. Abacha is cassava that has been cooked, shredded on a special grater, soaked overnight, rinsed and dried in the sun. Ugba is fermented oil bean seed, cooked for hours, sliced, rinsed and left to ferment. Neither is cooked when the dish is assembled. That is the striking thing about it: almost the entire preparation happens off the stove. Palm oil is turned into a thick yellow paste by working it with potash solution, and everything else is folded into that paste in sequence. The order matters, and Igbo cooks are firm about it, because the components will not distribute evenly if they all go in together. It belongs to ceremony. At an Igbo wedding, abacha is reserved for the important guests, and it is served with chilled palm wine, which is the pairing anyone from the region will name. Despite being filling enough to be a meal, it is treated as a snack rather than a main course. It can be served cold or warmed briefly, and the choice between the two is a matter of household preference rather than correctness.

Nigeria30 minFoodChef

Oat Pancakes

These are blended oat and banana pancakes, tagged in the source as a Nigerian oat pancake, and they belong to contemporary Nigerian home cooking rather than to any older tradition. Oats are not an African grain and arrived through import, but they have become a common breakfast staple in Nigerian urban households, usually as a porridge. What this recipe does is turn that pantry staple into pancakes with almost no effort: everything goes into a blender, and the batter is ready. Overripe banana provides the sweetness and much of the binding, which is why the sugar quantity is modest for the volume of oats. It is a practical way to use fruit that has gone too soft to eat. Nigeria has its own long standing pancake traditions that this is not. Masa is fermented rice cakes from the north, cooked in a dimpled pan. Ghanaian tatale is made from overripe plantain. Ojojo is grated water yam. Those are inherited dishes with regional identities. This is a modern breakfast, honestly framed as such, and it is included because it is Nigerian home cooking as it is actually practised now rather than as it was fifty years ago.

Nigeria40 minTaiwo Oladapo

Nigerian Native Jollof Rice

Native jollof is a distinct dish from the jollof most people know, and the difference is palm oil. Where party jollof is built on a reduced tomato and pepper base and comes out orange-red, native jollof is built on palm oil with locust beans, dried fish, crayfish and cow skin, and comes out darker, heavier and far more savoury. It belongs to southeastern Nigeria and has its own names there. Among the Efik it is iwuk edesi, sometimes simply called palm oil rice. Igbo households make closely related versions. It is not a variation on party jollof so much as a separate tradition that happens to share the word. The ingredients that define it are the ones that define southeastern cooking generally: iru or locust beans for their fermented depth, ground crayfish, dried and smoked fish, and ponmo, the cow skin cooked until soft. Scent leaf, the Nigerian basil, goes in at the very end. There is no tomato at all in this version, which is what separates it most sharply from what people expect when they hear jollof, and it is served with grilled local chicken rather than the fried chicken that accompanies the party version.

Nigeria1 hr 10 minChopsity.

Palm Wine Cocktail

Palm wine is the sap of palm trees, collected and left to ferment, and it is drunk across West and Central Africa. It is called nsafufuo in Ghana and emu in Nigeria, where ogogoro refers to the distilled spirit made from it rather than the wine itself. Tapping is a specialised job. Tappers climb to the upper part of the tree, where the sap is drawn from the crown, or a felled trunk is opened and the sap collected in jars. What comes out is white, sweet and barely alcoholic, and it begins fermenting the moment it is exposed to the wild yeasts in the air. Within about two hours it has developed roughly the alcohol content of a beer, and it keeps getting stronger and more sour from there. That speed explains everything about how it is sold. Traditional producers sell immediately after extraction because the drink changes hour by hour: sweet and mild in the morning, sharp and considerably stronger by evening. There is no way to hold it at a chosen point without modern processing. This recipe is the simplest possible serving, palm wine over ice with citrus and berries, and its purpose is to show what to do with a bottle rather than to teach a technique.

Nigeria8 minBlessing

Ofe Ugba

Ofe ugba is okra soup cooked with ugba, shredded, fermented African oil bean seed, and it belongs to Imo and Abia states in southeastern Nigeria, particularly to the people of Owerri and Mbaise. Ugba, also called ukpaka depending on where in Igboland you are, is made by boiling, slicing and fermenting the seed of the African oil bean tree. The fermentation is the entire point. Properly done, the shreds become tacky and almost cling together, and they carry a deep, pungent, savoury flavour that has no real substitute. It is eaten on its own as a salad with ugba and abacha, and used as an ingredient here. The distinction that matters, and the one the source is emphatic about, is that you cannot simply add ugba to okra soup and call it ofe ugba. The ugba has to be properly fermented first, and if it is not, the soup will taste like ordinary okra soup with something bland stirred through it. If it has not fermented enough, it is wrapped tightly and left longer. Around that sit the standard components, palm oil, assorted meat, dried fish, crayfish, pepper, and the okra itself for body. It is served with any of the swallows, and it is regional enough that many Nigerians have never eaten it.

NigeriaFoodChef

Foufou Powder

Foufou powder is the dried flour used to make fufu without pounding, and it is a manufactured product rather than a dish. Traditional fufu is made by pounding cooked cassava, yam or plantain in a mortar, which is slow and produces a wet paste that spoils quickly. The powder is the industrial answer to both problems. It is made from fermented cassava paste, dried and milled, and it carries the nutty, faintly sour flavour that fermentation gives. Plantain, cocoyam and yam are processed the same way, so foufou powder is a category rather than a single product. Most Nigerians in the south rank fufu second only to garri among indigenous staples. Foufou, fufu and foutou are the same word in different spellings, and the dish is eaten across western and central Africa and in the Caribbean, where it travelled with African migration. Its origin is generally given as Ghana. The powder is used for more than fufu: it thickens gravies, soups and stews, and it can be used to coat meat and fish for frying. This entry covers the powder and how to make fufu from it, along with the sauce the source pairs it with.

Nigeria1 hr 5 minCuisine228

Ayamase, the Nigerian green pepper stew with assorted meat and boiled eggs

Ayamase Sauce

Ayamase is the green pepper stew of southwestern Nigeria, known widely as designer stew, and it is the sibling of ofada stew rather than a version of it. The difference is the pepper: ofada uses red bell peppers and tomatoes and comes out red; ayamase uses green bell peppers and unripe scotch bonnets and comes out dark green. Bleached palm oil is what defines the technique. The oil is heated until it stops being red and turns clear, which changes its flavour entirely, removing the sweetness and leaving something deeper and more savoury. It is a step that fills a kitchen with smoke and it cannot be skipped without producing a different sauce. The rest is southwestern Nigerian cooking at full strength: locust beans for fermented depth, ground crayfish, assorted meat including tripe and cow skin, and whole hard eggs that sit in the sauce and take on its flavour. The sign that it is finished is the oil floating to the surface. It is served with ofada rice, the local short-grain rice, or with white rice or rice and beans, and it appears at parties and in restaurants as much as at home.

Nigeria50 minCook with Sandy

Bitter leaf Soup (Ofe Onugbu)

Ofe Onugbu is the bitter leaf soup of the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria, and its whole character rests on how much bitterness is left in the leaf. Onugbu is Vernonia amygdalina, bitter leaf, and it is genuinely bitter, unpalatably so if used straight. The preparation therefore begins with washing and squeezing the leaves repeatedly until most of that bitterness is drawn out. How far to go is a judgement, and it is where cooks differ: too little and the soup is harsh, too much and you have removed the thing the soup is named for. Some bitterness should remain. Cocoyam is the traditional thickener. The corms are boiled, peeled and pounded to a smooth paste, then dropped into the pot in small lumps that dissolve as it simmers, giving the soup its heavy, slightly sticky body. Palm oil, assorted beef including shaki, stockfish and dried fish, crayfish and ogiri Igbo make up the rest. Washed bitter leaf is sold ready-prepared in African grocers, which removes the most laborious and most judgement-dependent step.

NigeriaFoodChef

Ofada Stew Nigerian red bell pepper sauce with assorted meat and boiled eggs in a pot, served with Ofada rice on banana leaves

Ofada Stew Recipe

Ofada stew is the Yoruba stew served with ofada rice, and it is regularly confused with ayamase, including, as the source cheerfully admits, by people who have been eating both for years. The distinction is real and it is about the pepper. Ayamase, the green bell pepper stew also called designer stew, is built on green peppers and comes out dark olive. Ofada stew proper uses red peppers and tomatoes and is red. Both use bleached palm oil, both carry assorted meat and iru, and both are served with the same rice, which is exactly why the confusion is so widespread. Buka stew is a third relative in the same family, which does not help matters. The rice is the fixed point. Ofada is a local unpolished short-grain rice with an earthy, slightly fermented aroma that people either love or find odd. Its strong flavour is what these stews are built to stand up against, a delicate sauce would disappear next to it. Assorted meats are the other constant: beef, shaki, ponmo, offal, and locust bean for depth. It is traditionally served wrapped in leaves.

NigeriaBlessing

Recettes Nigeria

Nigerian Native Jollof Rice

Oat Pancakes

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Eba

Ayamase Sauce

Oha Soup

Eko (Agidi) and Efo Riro

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Fluffy Pancakes

Nigerian Amasi Spaghetti

Plats emblématiques : Nigeria

Recettes Nigeria les plus populaires

Igbo Yam Porridge

Hausa Masa

Agidi or Eko

Puff-Puff

Fluffy Pancakes

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Fura Da Nono

Nigerian Amasi Spaghetti

Eko (Agidi) and Efo Riro

Oha Soup

Ayamase Stew

Eba

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Oat Pancakes

Nigerian Native Jollof Rice

Palm Wine Cocktail

Ofe Ugba

Foufou Powder

Ayamase Sauce

Bitter leaf Soup (Ofe Onugbu)

Ofada Stew Recipe

Recettes Nigeria

Recettes à la une

Nigerian Native Jollof Rice

Ayamase Sauce

Oha Soup

Eko (Agidi) and Efo Riro

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Fluffy Pancakes

Nigerian Amasi Spaghetti

Plats emblématiques : Nigeria

Recettes Nigeria les plus populaires

Igbo Yam Porridge

Hausa Masa

Agidi or Eko

Puff-Puff

Fluffy Pancakes

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Fura Da Nono

Nigerian Amasi Spaghetti

Eko (Agidi) and Efo Riro

Oha Soup

Ayamase Stew

Eba

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Oat Pancakes

Nigerian Native Jollof Rice

Palm Wine Cocktail

Ofe Ugba

Foufou Powder

Ayamase Sauce

Bitter leaf Soup (Ofe Onugbu)

Ofada Stew Recipe